We called it "Little Christmas", when we were kids, and looked forward to it and to a visit from LaBefana and /or The 3 Kings.
At our house we kept our Christmas decorations up until January 7th , the evening meal was always a bit fancier than usual, and the candle kept lit for the 3Kings was not relit because they had already found the stable where the Baby Jesus was born. That candle in a jar was probably my favorite decoration, because I got to light it each day at sunset.
Small gifts, humorous gifts were exchanged. Often the Three Kings camels left us a gift or two perhaps the camels deposited black jelly beans in the shoes we left out for them to fill. Sometimes Befana left "coal candy" for us all.
Celebrating , though not exactly the same way our ancestors did, was a connection to our ancestors.
LA BEFANA
The Good Witch of Epiphany
and the Cycles of Time...
Although she first appeared in written reference in a poem from the mid-1500s, this Strega Buona has been part of Italian custom and folklore since the 800s. Befana was always a figure of the people, a bony old lady, a widow, who wore a dirty, patched dress and a black shawl. But she flew on a broomstick. She was relatable to all the poor. In medieval Italy as in all of Europe there was a huge divide between the wealthy and the poor, and La Befana, as she was known and is still known to this day, was no glamorous upper class lady. In her stories, she lived on her own, alone in a small run down house, but she was a meticulous housekeeper and not only swept her dirt floors each day, but the whole walk up to her little shack. She was good at baking and loved to make breads and cookies, and when there was enough sugar in her larder, even candies. Her night of January 5th, the eve of Epiphany in the Christian calendar, is even more important in Italy and to Italian children than Christmas is for excitedly anticipating gifts and goodies. On that night, La Befana flies on her broomstick all over Italy and down each chimney to stuff stockings with little gifts and sweets for the children there. That is why her dress and face are dirty with soot. If the home does not have a chimney, she has other magical ways of getting in to fill the children's stockings such as making herself tiny and coming through the front or back door keyhole. Oh, but if the child has been bad, she or he gets garlic bulbs and onions, and a piece of black coal. (Actually now confectioners make a candy called carbone which looks like a lump of coal.)
The history of how this good witch became and has stayed so popular and alive is interesting, amazing, and of course has Pagan origins. Otherwise, how could a witch have anything to do with Christmas? She had to have been so popular and so powerful a spirit being prior to Christianity arriving that the Church could not get rid of her or assimilate her into the figure of Mary. So let's climb into the Way Back Machine and find out just where she came from. First, her name: although many believe her name derived from the Italian word for Epiphany, epifania, because she began to have that association after the Church in the 1200s declared the 6th of January as Epiphany (awakening) when the Three Magi were supposed to have visited the child Jesus. (I'll tell that story later.) However, because her origins seem to be still older than Christianized Italy, there is another theory that her name derives from the Greek word, theophaenia. meaning “manifestation of God”. And she is posited as morphing or descending from the old domestic Roman Goddess Strenia (or Strenua) who presided over the New Year, purification, good health physically, spiritually, and emotionally, and was a protector of mothers and children. This Roman Goddess had a strong link with the Mother Goddess, Juno, and meshed with an Etruscan Mother Goddess who presided over the same areas of life as well as ancestral spirits, fertility, abundance, the forest, and the cycles of the year.
This association with the Ancestors, or ancestral spirits, is important because in pre-Christian Italy January 6th was the last day of the two week festival of Saturnalia which was a huge celebration beginning on the Winter Solstice. It was on this last day that the household spirits of the ancestors, the lari, were honored. And it was on this day that people went to the Temple of Juno on Capitoline Hill to have their fortunes for the new year told by an elder priestess/oracle of Juno. This carried into the subsequent centuries as a traditional time to do divination, with the 12 days between the eve of Christmas and Epiphany seen as magical and associated with witches and supernatural creatures. Before it was Christianized, some areas of Italy had a festival on January 6th where the ancestors brought good omens of abundance to the living and fortunes were told for the New Year.
Also influencing this entity of Befana, were the Celtic tribes who settled in northern Italy in the Pianura Padana and part of the Alps. At this time of the year, they had huge bonfires for the newborn Sun, to bring fertility to their crops and animals. The Celtic female shaman/priestesses took the form of a winter hag Goddess in the vein of La Befana to set fire to the wicker puppets which were also burned at this time. This ritual carried over into the Italian villages as they burned an effigy of an old woman in the town square, “The Old Lady”, to burn away the old year, and allow the spring to grow from the ashes. This was a symbol of the cycles of time and nature which always begin and end and begin again. The broom on which Befana rides is also linked to the Celts as they venerated and worshiped the spirits of trees, and burning the wood of the bonfires was an act of purification and cleansing. In this vein, Befana always sweeps the floor of the homes she visits after she fills stockings, to cleanse the home so that the New Year can come in uninfluenced by the troubles of the old year.
From the British Isles to Russia, there are winter crone Goddesses who rule those months of cold, barrenness, and darkness. They are great Mother Goddesses who wish to keep their people alive and well during those difficult months. These Goddesses were all-loving, generous, and benevolent, and like Befana, rewarded the good and industrious and punished the lazy, selfish, and disobedient. La Befana was the guardian of the hearth and the home. And as she flew down the chimney, she was also the link between the astral, celestial realms and the earthly. She is one of these many crone Goddesses who represented the death of the old year and the way-shower for the new year. She is sometimes associated with Hekate as she rules that time “in between”, the time between the Winter Solstice and the beginning New Year.
So to funnel these thousands of years of story surrounding La Befana to the present day, we come to the charming Christian story about her and the eve of Epiphany which commemorates the day the Three Magi, or astrologers/ sorcerers got to where Jesus and his parents were in order to honor the child with precious and rare gifts usually given to royalty. The Three Magi were traveling toward Nazareth to find the child Jesus and with their camels, servants, provisions, they made quite a procession. Befana was out in front of her house sweeping the walk with her broom. She was quite dazzled by this exotic group.
Relieved to find someone friendly on their travels where they might take a rest, they asked Befana if they might rest there for the night. She said she had only a small place and nothing fine to offer them, but they wanted to stay with her. So she fixed them a simple supper and offered them places to sleep. While they were there, they explained to her where they were going and who they expected to find. Because of her enormous kindness to them in her poverty, they asked her to accompany them to find the holy child. But Befana declined saying she had so much housework to do that she couldn't just shut up her little home and leave. The next morning the Magi went on their way continuing their journey.
After they had gone, Befana began to think she had made the wrong decision. She made up her mind to bake some goodies for the holy child, and along with trinkets she had made for children in the village, put them in her big market basket and catch up with the Magi. So she baked and wrapped and tucked it all into her basket. She swept out her home one last time, closed the door and started after the Magi. She never caught up with them, and in fact got hopelessly lost. So she began flying over the villages on her broom searching for the holy boy. Since she didn't want to miss him, she decided that she would just fly down every chimney of every house with children and leave some of her bakery and trinkets for every child.
That's the story that every Italian child knows by heart. La Befana was, up until recent decades, the main excitement for children in Italy in the Christmas season. She would get letters written to her about what presents a child would like, or wishes made to the moon for gifts. And her handiwork would be found on the morning of January 6th in the stockings the children hung on their bedposts or by the hearthfire – sweets, toys, books, figs and dates, and nuts. Unless you had been a bad child, of course. Then you got bulbs of garlic, onions, and a lump of coal, or that substitute candy, carbone.
This powerful Goddess who presided over the turn of the year, the cycles of the seasons and time, has become a charming, benevolent crone witch who truly could not be more beloved in her native land. The place in Italy where she is believed to have had her home is Urbania, and every year, the festival there surrounding her grows. In recent years there has been as many as 50,000 people there for the week of January 5 and 6, reveling as they used to in days of old.
All Hail La Befana! The Good Witch of the magic of the Winter Solstice.
May she never cease to fly on her broom on the eve of Epiphany!
(c) Diane Horton
